Senior Policy Data Analyst

<p><strong>Location:</strong> Remote, New York City, or Oakland</p> <ul> <li>Travel is encouraged approximately once every 6 months to state partners within the continental USA, and occasionally required. We expect these trips to include visits to prisons and parole offices.</li> </ul> <p><strong>Role Type:</strong> Full-time</p> <p><strong>Compensation</strong>:  $120,000</p> <p><strong>Visa sponsorship:</strong> Not available</p> <p><strong>Hires remotely in:</strong> United States</p> <p><strong>Experience:</strong> 5+ years of full-time, professional work experience</p> <h1><strong> </strong></h1> <p>Recidiviz is thrilled to be hiring a Senior Policy Data Analyst to join our team! We’re a small, fast-moving group that works with complex criminal justice data from our state partners and develops analyses and tools that target the drivers of incarceration. That’s where you come in. We’re looking for someone who has creativity and inquisitiveness to identify and solve open-ended problems, clarity to think through complex and variable data, flexibility to adjust in a rapidly evolving environment, and above all else, a collaborative, kind nature to add to our culture.</p> <h2>About us</h2> <p>Recidiviz is creating safer, healthier communities by improving outcomes for people in the criminal justice system. We build technology to reduce the number of people in prison and to help criminal justice leaders embrace data-driven decision-making. </p> <h1><strong> </strong></h1> <p>Using software tools and thoughtful product design, we’ve been able to safely and permanently reduce incarceration and improve outcomes. We work side-by-side with leaders of the criminal justice system, people in prison and on supervision, and ecosystem partners to build a better path forward. In addition to the revenue we earn from state partners, some of the most respected philanthropists and foundations support our work.</p> <h1><strong> </strong></h1> <p>People who succeed at Recidiviz lead with kindness and humility, assume good intent, learn from failure, and fix problems when they see them. They are excited to work arm in arm with government leadership and staff to improve outcomes. They are great listeners. They build deep relationships with and empathy for the people we work with and the people who our mission serves, even when those two groups feel at odds. </p> <h3>About the role</h3> <p>Recidiviz's policy team works with state DOC leaders who want to rewrite old policies or write new ones, grounded in evidence and analytics, to improve outcomes. We use administrative datasets to generate context-responsive insights that expand momentum for policy change. We answer questions like:</p> <ul> <li>What earned sentence credit structure creates the strongest reward system given the distribution of sentence lengths and program availability?</li> <li>How do the factors that drive parole board decisions align with the factors most quantitatively predictive of post-release outcomes? How would outcomes change if dynamic factors were weighted more heavily?</li> <li>How will a new supervision contact standard affect the alignment between supervision officer bandwidth and high-need clients? </li> </ul> <p>By translating policy concepts into concrete modeling, we help states make smarter and more ambitious changes.</p> <p>Senior Policy Data Analysts are high-autonomy technical contributors. They own an end to end analytic process — breaking project objectives into analytical products, designing the approach, derisking the timeline, producing the findings, and preparing the materials that go in front of decision-makers. The core skill is decision-support: building analysis for a decision rather than for a research finding. </p> <p>This role is as much about making judgment calls as it is about running analytical work. Most of our projects are first of their kind, which requires designing the approach as you go. Projects change mid-flight as our understanding of system dynamics develops and the needs of stakeholders shift. This role works closely with a Partnerships Lead, who coordinates with state partners to determine project objectives. The Senior Policy Data Analyst sets the analysis strategy to meet those objectives. Success is measured by the impact your interventions drive. </p> <h2>Core responsibilities</h2> <ul> <li><strong>Building analysis from corrections and parole data</strong>. You'll use SQL and Python to wrangle administrative data to articulate how a system behaves. You ramp up on new data quickly, going deep where it changes the answer and making defensible simplifying assumptions where it doesn’t.</li> <li><strong>Modeling policy scenarios and quantifying tradeoffs</strong>. Apply statistical methods like regressions, time series, stock-and-flow modeling or distributional analysis to project how outcomes change under different policy designs, and assess what the data can and can't support. A core judgment is developing simple and elegant approaches that cut to the heart of the decision point.</li> <li><strong>Communicating findings to the people making the decision</strong>. You work backward from what information a stakeholder needs to advance decision-making in the room. You'll create the decks and memos that go to DOC leadership, find the frameworks that make a complicated tradeoff digestible, and take responsibility for tailoring your work to the audience to motivate <em&